=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #128
—May 9, 1989—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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STANDARDS TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC.
Whenever someone wants to make some money and consequently dumps
chemicals into a community’s air or water, they are quick to
point out that what they’re doing “meets all state and federal
standards.” It is time we took a close look at the way standards
have been set in this country.
The federal government has set air quality standards for only
about a dozen pollutants. So the states have had to do it
themselves. As of September, 1988, 37 states had set air quality
standards based on a “threshold limit values” (TLVs) established
by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists
(ACGIH). The ACGIH published its first list of TLVs in 1946 and
has published updated lists every year since. The ACGIH began as
a voluntary association of federal, state and local officials,
but quickly its ranks swelled with academic researchers employed
by industry, and by full-time industrial consultants.
In the early days, industry was the only source of data, and an
unwilling source. In the United States, there was no federal
regulation of general industry workplace hazards until 1971 (when
the Occupational Safety and Health Act, OSHA, passed by Congress
in 1970, went into effect). Consequently throughout the ’40s,
’50s and ’60s, there was no independent source of information
about the exposure of workers to chemicals and the consequences
of those exposures (dose-response relationships). Industry was
the only source of data on these matters and industry was under
no obligation to tell what it knew. The head of the ACGIH TLV
committee wrote in 1969, “The data are in short supply because
industries either do not develop long-term studies, or if they
do, more often than not, do not see fit to release the data in
the open literature.”
It is important to understand this concept of “open literature.”
Despite what you may have been taught in school, science does not
produce “the” answer on any given question. The scientific method
does not arrive at definitive answers, it arrives at conclusions
that are always considered tentative, and it arrives at those
conclusions through publication of different studies so that
scientists can reach a consensus on what’s right and what’s
wrong, what’s true and what’s not. As studies are published for
all to see (in the “open literature”), different scientific
groups criticize each other’s methods and reasoning and
conclusions; then they do new studies and publish their results;
these in turn are criticized, and so a consensus develops that
“yes, probably this chemical will not produce clinical symptoms
of disease at x level of exposure for such and such a period of
time under such and such conditions.”
Studies that are not published in the open literature cannot be
criticized. Their methods and reasoning cannot be scrutinized. In
short they cannot participate in the scientific process that
leads to consensus. Studies that are not published subvert the
process of scientific inquiry which depends entirely upon public
appraisal and reappraisal by practitioners searching for the
always-elusive “truth.”
In 1971, nearly all of the ACGIH’s TLVs were adopted by the brand
new Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as
official workplace standards. At that point it was clear to any
observer that the ACGIH would continue to influence federal
workplace safety standards.
In 1970, the ACGIH TLV committee had added two Dow Chemical
toxicologists to its ranks. In 1972, a Dupont industrial
hygienist joined the committee. One of the Dow representatives,
and the DuPont representative, became two of the four members of
the new ACGIH committee on carcinogenic substances in 1972. The
minutes of ACGIH meetings throughout the ’70s show that industry
representatives took on the task of setting safety standards for
chemicals that their own firms produced. Specifically, the Dow
representative had primary responsibility for establishing the
TLVs for the following products manufactured by Dow, many of
which are known carcinogens: vinyl chloride, vinylidine chloride,
chloroform, methyl chloride, ethylene dichloride, ethylene
dibromide, trichlorobenzene, dioxane, ethanolamine, dipropylene
oxide methyl ether, styrene, ethylene glycol,
dibromochloropropane, “Tordon,” “Ruelene,” “Dursban,” and
“Plictran.” The DuPont representative had primary responsibility
for setting safety standards for these DuPont products: dimethyl
sulfate, “MOCA,” lead chromate, formamide,
dichloromonofluoromethane, “Lannate,” “Karmex,” and “Hyvar X.”
We have selected only the grossest examples of conflict of
interest affecting the ACGIH standardssetting process.
Unfortunately, for the past 20 years or longer, the ACGIH has
routinely used unscientific procedures, and secret industry data,
to set workplace standards. A recent study of the ACGIH and its
standards-setting processes concluded that “unpublished corporate
communications were important in developing TLVs for 104
substances; for 15 of these, the TLV documentation was based
solely on such information.”
Thus, many standards initially set by the ACGIH, then adopted
uncritically by the federal government, and now being adopted
uncritically by state governments, were never established by a
scientifically valid process. They were established by
companysponsored scientists (some would call them indentured
savants, others would give them the harsher name, biostitutes)
whose goals were not to establish the truth, but were to press
for levels of control that satisfied industry’s needs. After all,
controlling chemicals costs money, so really strict controls are
expensive; laxer controls are cheaper, sometimes substantially
cheaper.
Perhaps the more important point is that ACGIH standards were
never intended as general environmental standards. The ACGIH
specifically warns against using its published standards to set
environmental standards because its TLVs pertain to the
workplace, not to the general environment. Workers are different
from the general public. Workers are in the prime years of life;
they are healthy; they get a paycheck so presumably they are
well-fed. Most of them are white, most of them are males. There
are no babies in the workplace, no old people, no chronically ill
people. Standards intended to protect only workers will
definitely not adequately protect the general public.
Nevertheless, state agencies often have no resources to develop
their own standards, so they adopt ACGIH values, reduce them by
an arbitrary amount (often a hundred-fold reduction) and declare
them “safe” for the public. The “safety” of such standards is
entirely dependent upon the original “safety” of the ACGIH
standards and they were often set, as we have seen, under the
influence of industry consultants to protect industry’s interests.
The next time someone tells you their project is going to meet
all state and federal standards, look into it very closely. You
may be unpleasantly surprised.
The entire structure of pollution control developed in the U.S.
over the past 20 years is dependent upon numerical standards. If
the standards cannot be relied upon because they were established
by unscientific processes, the entire framework of regulation is
called into question.
Furthermore, if government hasn’t the resources to test and
evaluate new chemicals independently as they appear, this means
that industry will continue to be the only source of available
data in many cases. Thus it appears that the problem is
structural and is not likely to be resolved easily. Something
fundamental may have to change.
[To be continued.]
Get: Barry Castleman and Grace Ziem, “Toxic Pollutants, Science,
and Corporate Influence,” ARCHIVES OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH, Vol.
44 (No. 2), March/April, 1989, pgs. 68, 127; and the same
authors, “Corporate Influence on Threshold Limit Values.”
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE, Vol. 13 (1988), pgs.
531-559. Free reprints available from Dr. Castleman, 1722 Linden
Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: federal regulations; tlvs; air quality
standards; osha; conflict of interest; acgih; conflict resolution;